Taylor Brorby: BOYS AND OIL

Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI Radio in New York

(8/4/22) Taylor Brorby author of Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land, recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections. Join us when Brorby, an Annie Tanner Clark Fellow in Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah discusses his memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, on this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI 99.5FM.